Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 08:12:49 -0400
From: Thomas F Brown <tombrown@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Subject: Re: Areas of interest/prestige
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Message-id: <97Jun24.081252edt.51-7@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

>Is sociology a highly respected department in your university? 

Well, it brings in more money than history, anthropology, politics,
and english, so I would guess it has more status here than those
departments.

>Do your friends in English get excited about current sociologists? 

Why would they? Most current sociology is too specialized, parochial,
and poorly written to excite anybody at all.

>Is sociology widely acknowledged to be the place to go if you
>want to do social theory? 

I don't know. What does it mean to "do" social theory? Here we do
empirical research in a theoretical context. No one writes theory
divorced from evidence. This would be the wrong department to
come to for that.

>Actually, no. This is not a matter of simple parochialism. English and
>literary studies have repeatedly raided/appropriated/colonized other fields,
>because they appreciate (some of) what is happening in anthropology,
>psychology, political science, biology, physics, etc. Current sociology
>doesn't seem to command the same respect--although, admittedly, Marx and
>Weber and some others do.

Are we going to judge our status by how much literary studies borrows
from us? I don't see the relevance. Are we writing science or literature?